Industry Devblogs Leaked

After a lot of long nights and mountains of data parsing involving a 26GB dataset, I have information about the upcoming Industry related Devblogs to share before the official announcements out of CCP’s headquarters. The Heartbleed security exploit allowed me to gather information about the topics from the CSM-CCP private forum and here’s what I found.

Data Mining

Piecing together forum content 64K at a time was no easy task; there is a lot of change in the memory while people are using the forums. Now that I am living in GMT-8, I did a lot of the data collection over my evening to early morning hours. I knew that this was the best time to try to gather chunks of memory with the least amount of change due to the majority of the users being asleep.

I ran my exploit code at random intervals during the night from various VPN endpoints to try to keep the attack sources unidentifiable and obfuscated. Each time I was successful at getting a chunk of the server’s memory, I saved the output to a database.

Using some data mining techniques, I was able to make some of the 64K memory blocks overlap and build larger sections. Eventually I was able to get some partial HTML pages that were human readable, filled with the details of the upcoming devblogs.

So far CCP has released two out of the six total blogs and here is the detail on the upcoming content:

#3 Industry UI

John Lander, also known as CCP Unifex, gave an announcement during Fanfest 2013 that his team was going to deliver a mobile portal into the Eve universe to allow some game functionality on tablets and phones devices. He recently announced that he was leaving CCP and I found that there was a lot of questions about what to do with the code that has been created by his team.

Code equals development time, which equals money. As far as the investors are concerned, the code that was written is still valuable and since it is a line item on the balance sheets, it should be used in some fashion. The board of directors did not want to write off the value because the mobile development group was being shutdown.

CCP Punkturis‎, a respected User Interface Programmer, just returned from maternity leave and had a empty task list; she was put in charge of salvaging the mobile framework into something usable. What is being delivered is a Industry UI that is built entirely around a grid structure. Each of the block represents an input. The goal of the design is that you have to feed in items to equal 2048 in order to start the industry job. If you don’t reach a multiple of 2048, the job doesn’t start.

The intense hatred and heated ramblings that we see on the public forums regarding the Invention system and existence of Tech2 BPOs is also mirrored on the CSM-CCP private forums. The community backlash and scars from the t20 incident in 2007 are still not healed. The Summer theme of reworking industry was seen as a great time to change the design to ease the suffering and apologize for the hurt feelings.

CCP plans to add an additional component to Tech 2 BPOs in order to complicate their production and create a bottleneck that can be controlled. All existing Tech 2 BPOs in the game are going to require various amounts of Fedo as inputs. This additional input allows CCP to control the spawn rates of Fedo asteroids that can only be mined by Modulated Deep Core Miner II’s.

Fedo asteroids can only be sourced from Palpis system in the Devoid region so this system is going to become as valuable as X-7OMU in Pure Blind, the primary source for Sisters of Eve LP mission runners.

#5 Job Cost Scaling

The idea on the table is to make industry more collaborative and nerf the profitability for solo-manufactures; CCP is forcing us to play with other people. Their idea is that the more people the better so job costs will sale with the size of your corporation with alliances receiving an extra bonus on top of that.

Initial proposed scaling numbers result in a 838.6% profit benefit to being in a 11,120 member alliance like Goonswarm Federation.

#6 Teams

A major complaint of people is that if you want to partner up with a person from another corporation or alliance, you lack the ability to share resources in a secure fashion. A ‘team’ is a new tab in the corporation window where you can link external entities and give them access to your resources such as corporation hangars, and manufacturing slots, and POSes. A new, more tab-intense, nested window structure within the Corporation tab is being delivered to us.

Trebor Daehdoow, the CSM8 Chairman, was found stating that “this tabular, nested design is really the height of user experience. I can’t think of a better way to sort and filter for things.”

Note: I hope you enjoyed this troll post. None of the actions outlined actually occurred and everything reported is made-up.